The Data Science Course From Hell That Nearly Broke Me And My Tutor

An accelerated course using an outdated text taught by a new professor at the height of COVID. What could go wrong?

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“How are you doing this?”

Eric* removed his glasses to wipe his eyes, visibly exhausted from our marathon tutoring session, now entering its second hour. But the duration of his next sigh revealed that it wasn’t just the time of night that was draining him.

Something was wrong.

He minimized the window he used for our virtual white board sessions, in case the cursor blinking in the background would somehow undercut his point.

“Let me ask you something: How are the other students in your class doing this?”

I mumbled something about office hours and Slack problem-solving, but that didn’t satisfy him.

“No, I mean how are any of you doing this? This isn’t a master’s level assignment. This would be difficult for a PhD student.”

The assignment in question involved translating pseudo code into data mining items using item-pair matching. At least that’s what I think it was.